Programmers playing economics
I dedicate this post to all those programmers who believe that they owe their high salaries solely to their mental abilities, as well as to young people who want to “learn from the programmer because they are paid more.” I will not argue that there are no high salaries in the industry because they are still there, but I will sign for why not everyone has them. And why even a good qualification does not guarantee a good salary.
Before you start reading this, I will note that the author does not have an economic education, and all his thoughts about economics are based on skipped school and university courses in economics, excerpts from crazy dreams, Yes !, magazine materials and posts (near) political forums . Therefore, if after reading this post you have a feeling of disagreement with the author, then just do not take what you read seriously.
')
Living in one of the city-states, such as Moscow, St. Petersburg or Kiev, you can not even notice that programmers are fundamentally different from other people, because wages are higher in almost all professions than the national average. However, we will leave the search for an answer to this amazing paradox to political activists from LJ, and turn our eyes to the province themselves. And there we will see what we are looking for - job vacancies for programmers with a salary exceeding the average in the region for both mental and physical workers.
Here, the most corrosive reader will exclaim that he has a familiar welder / turner / doctor who has paid, does, and will pay to all these knights, circles and keyboards. And this is wonderful, it is encouraging, but does not reflect the picture as a whole. On average, the average programmer has a higher salary than the average employee in the region (although we will find out below that this is not true for all programmers). I was pushed into this article by an analysis of the qualifications and salaries of several of my former fellow programmers, showing that there are much more important things in the profession than qualifications that affect your salary.
Conventionally, all programmers can be divided into 2 categories - those who are lucky to get into the outsourcing firms, and those who burn life working in firms focused on the domestic market. In advanced cases, the difference between the salaries of approximately the same programmers' qualifications may be in order, but fortunately such cases are quite rare. At the same time, I do not consider the aforementioned city-states, where the picture is more blurred and the bias is not so strong in the first place, and secondly the gradient of salaries is smoother depending on the qualifications. To remove another factor that breaks all the statistics, I’ll say that even in small web studios working for the domestic market there can be large salaries, provided that they have access to large solvent clients.
Let's take a closer look at two types of these firms, let's start with those that work for the domestic market. And who are these employers? These are 1C-offices of all stripes and sizes, web-studios that make websites for companies within the country and try their luck on Appstore and Google Play, these are banks, enterprises, state-owned enterprises, where programmers are needed to support internal software, as if everything. In Ukraine, the main range of salaries for programmers (not Timlids) lies in the range from 2500 to 6000 hryvnia, according to my observations, for Russia this range is 15-25 tr. These salaries are far from fabulous, about which very fortunate people like to have a few thousand dollars a month in a non-managerial position, but still somewhat higher than what other workers and engineers get. Below I will explain why.
Requirements for programmers can be very different - from the insignificant in state-owned enterprises, where you need knowledge of Delphi / C # and Firebird / MS SQL, to very high ones, usually in web studios, where you need a man-orchestra, because orders are intercepted for everything. Salaries at state enterprises will lead us away from economic issues to humanism and humanity issues, therefore we will omit this category. Banks and enterprises do not like to pay much either, to admit I still have a sarcastic smile, words that only the best are taken to banks and it is prestigious to work there. But, nevertheless, salaries are higher there, and some growth to the head of the department is partly consistent with the conviction of high salaries in the industry (while everyone misses that annoying detail that growth in the career ladder towards a manager is accompanied by a significant increase in salaries in almost any industry ).
Web studios (recall that the conversation will go about those that work on the domestic market and do not have “elite” clients) - this is a separate conversation, it can reign as freelancing with a reduction factor - i.e. salary is collected from a percentage of projects, and the standard fixed salary. In any case, these salaries are due to the solvency of customers who are small and medium-sized businesses. I think you know as well as I can about the solvency of the latter when it comes to investing in your own website or online store. Just in case, let me remind you right away that even companies that “saw” government orders do not have high salaries for programmers .
Now let's dive into the sea of ​​outsourcing to the countries of the first world. Here, the main combat units are freelancers, web studios, as well as serious large firms leading multi-million projects. What can be said for sure here is the fact that in all these structures the salary does not fall below $ 400. The rest of the requirements differ - for narrow-specialization freelancers, it turns out to get through to a bet of $ 50 / hour or more, but, more often, you can either sit at the rate of $ 10–30 / hour, writing on something trend, or suck your paw for the fact that the narrow specialization did not coincide with the needs of the market. In general, with good English, confident qualifications and some luck, you can get more than 95% of the population of the CIS.
Web studios operate with amounts comparable to our internal "elite" customers, so the value of orders can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars, but as a rule, in such places, wages rarely rise above $ 1,500. Of the significant advantages - it is usually enough for a programmer to do programming, not CEO, layout, sharp layouts and other things that are so important in web development, and at the same time so far from programming. By the way, most of the graduates with their knowledge will go to this place only for the minimum wage in the range of $ 400-800 and most likely will remain on it until they are transferred to another company.
Serious firms can vary greatly in requirements and salaries. Those that are smaller are usually recruited only by seniors, but for z / a $ 1500-4000, those that can even afford to train people who are far from programming on their own courses (however, as a result, the best are still selected). As a rule, in large companies growth is possible from 400 to 800-1000 $, a further increase in salaries usually rests on career growth. So if you have heard about high salaries in a large company, then you need to be either a semi-god, or telling has a thinking feature that does not allow him to distinguish the team leader / manager from the programmer.
In general, the situation in programming is similar to many engineering specialties - in the sense of most European countries and in the United States the salaries of technical specialists are much higher than ours. But still there is one difference - programmers have a little higher salary here than other engineers, due to the fact that the same PHP-person from a provincial town is much easier to start working for a company from another point on the globe than a design engineer. Therefore, in order to avoid 1C across the country, business cards and web stores were created, programmers have to pay. For they have where to run. Such is the selective globalization.
All of this has been told that you roughly represent the difference between salaries for programmers working on the domestic and foreign markets. It is caused by the fact that prices are always tied to demand, but demand is largely determined by customers' solvency. In economics, much is interconnected - its level determines the level of solvency of customers located in it. Everything goes along the chain - low incomes of the population give low incomes to business, then the chain goes from business to business until it reaches the one that wants to get some IT services. The income of the final link, web studios for example, is directly proportional to what is happening in the rest of the chain. We can also say about the administrative, legislative and tax factors that influence the formation of the ultimate solvency of demand, but I can only guess about their real contribution. Even if we take into account the greed of the leadership, in the end we will come to the conclusion that it pays as much as it can pay, and it can pay as much as it earns, and its earnings are tied to the rest of the economy. Generally speaking, how much do programmers working on the domestic market get is the real salary of a programmer (with a small amendment, which is discussed below), which shows how much his knowledge and skills are compared to any other profession in your country.
But when a customer is separated from the general economic chain, then the very same web studio will receive income that is not tied to the economic situation of its region. Laws of common sense suggest that most likely the contractor will want to work with the external customer who is willing to pay more compared to the others. Which leads us to the fact that outsourcing is usually west. And it is from there that the money goes to pay for the work of the developers. In general, the IT market is global, the customer can find a contractor anywhere in the world, and the prices here are global. Those. we have Indians, there are various kinds of dampers, but they determine the lowest possible price, but not the maximum. It so happened that the main price is close to the maximum, there are historical prerequisites, such as the fact that the industry was originally born in those regions where the economy was developed accordingly. Well and, nevertheless, the result to a large extent depends on the price where the economy works, which is again observed in the west. Perhaps the true reasons are different, but this is not the point now. The other thing is important - two people from different countries with the same qualifications will receive different pay for the same job due to the economic situation in these countries. If the payment comes from another country or from the global market, then it does not reflect anything except how much this country or market is willing to pay. Earlier, I negotiated our "elite" customers, in the conditions of the CIS, these are usually companies whose revenues do not fit into the overall economic picture - either those working for the external market (selling resources), either state-owned companies, or companies using administrative resources ... Simply put - their solvency is not fully tied to the solvency of the region.
The salary in this case turns out to be formal, as it is determined by the solvency of the companies of the customers with whom the programmer’s company works - the spread can be enormous, even though the market is global, it represents firms of different levels. It cannot reflect the level of qualification, since comparison with programmers of the domestic market is meaningless - they cannot be paid more, comparison with other similar firms is also meaningless - different customers with different amounts of money. It turns out an interesting situation when the salary is determined not by the qualifications but by the correctness of the place of entry of the programmer. Even if we weed out the domestic market, we’ll get into a comical situation when the salary is determined by the customers caught by the chosen company. The salary qualification here is influenced in a bizarre way - this is the entrance barrier that weed out weak programmers, and of course there is a hard gradation between junior and senior salaries. But in these two categories, wages are determined by how rich the firm’s customer is and, in part, by its personnel policy. Of course, at the macro level everything is logical, the laws of supply and demand work, but at the micro level, the level of a specific programmer, the pattern of his salary size resembles a random distribution.
Is it good or bad? Personally, I like to receive a salary five times higher than the average in the city. Is it fair? No, this is not fair, it is a kind of cheating - there is a game on the difference in the standard of living of the CIS and first world countries. What to do? Stop thinking that if you are a programmer, then you have achieved everything yourself and your salary is due to your personal qualities (no, of course, to some extent it is due to). And do not forget that a free labor market exists only in your profession and in a couple of large cities.
Before you start reading this, I will note that the author does not have an economic education, and all his thoughts about economics are based on skipped school and university courses in economics, excerpts from crazy dreams, Yes !, magazine materials and posts (near) political forums . Therefore, if after reading this post you have a feeling of disagreement with the author, then just do not take what you read seriously.
')
Living in one of the city-states, such as Moscow, St. Petersburg or Kiev, you can not even notice that programmers are fundamentally different from other people, because wages are higher in almost all professions than the national average. However, we will leave the search for an answer to this amazing paradox to political activists from LJ, and turn our eyes to the province themselves. And there we will see what we are looking for - job vacancies for programmers with a salary exceeding the average in the region for both mental and physical workers.
Here, the most corrosive reader will exclaim that he has a familiar welder / turner / doctor who has paid, does, and will pay to all these knights, circles and keyboards. And this is wonderful, it is encouraging, but does not reflect the picture as a whole. On average, the average programmer has a higher salary than the average employee in the region (although we will find out below that this is not true for all programmers). I was pushed into this article by an analysis of the qualifications and salaries of several of my former fellow programmers, showing that there are much more important things in the profession than qualifications that affect your salary.
Conventionally, all programmers can be divided into 2 categories - those who are lucky to get into the outsourcing firms, and those who burn life working in firms focused on the domestic market. In advanced cases, the difference between the salaries of approximately the same programmers' qualifications may be in order, but fortunately such cases are quite rare. At the same time, I do not consider the aforementioned city-states, where the picture is more blurred and the bias is not so strong in the first place, and secondly the gradient of salaries is smoother depending on the qualifications. To remove another factor that breaks all the statistics, I’ll say that even in small web studios working for the domestic market there can be large salaries, provided that they have access to large solvent clients.
Let's take a closer look at two types of these firms, let's start with those that work for the domestic market. And who are these employers? These are 1C-offices of all stripes and sizes, web-studios that make websites for companies within the country and try their luck on Appstore and Google Play, these are banks, enterprises, state-owned enterprises, where programmers are needed to support internal software, as if everything. In Ukraine, the main range of salaries for programmers (not Timlids) lies in the range from 2500 to 6000 hryvnia, according to my observations, for Russia this range is 15-25 tr. These salaries are far from fabulous, about which very fortunate people like to have a few thousand dollars a month in a non-managerial position, but still somewhat higher than what other workers and engineers get. Below I will explain why.
Requirements for programmers can be very different - from the insignificant in state-owned enterprises, where you need knowledge of Delphi / C # and Firebird / MS SQL, to very high ones, usually in web studios, where you need a man-orchestra, because orders are intercepted for everything. Salaries at state enterprises will lead us away from economic issues to humanism and humanity issues, therefore we will omit this category. Banks and enterprises do not like to pay much either, to admit I still have a sarcastic smile, words that only the best are taken to banks and it is prestigious to work there. But, nevertheless, salaries are higher there, and some growth to the head of the department is partly consistent with the conviction of high salaries in the industry (while everyone misses that annoying detail that growth in the career ladder towards a manager is accompanied by a significant increase in salaries in almost any industry ).
Web studios (recall that the conversation will go about those that work on the domestic market and do not have “elite” clients) - this is a separate conversation, it can reign as freelancing with a reduction factor - i.e. salary is collected from a percentage of projects, and the standard fixed salary. In any case, these salaries are due to the solvency of customers who are small and medium-sized businesses. I think you know as well as I can about the solvency of the latter when it comes to investing in your own website or online store. Just in case, let me remind you right away that even companies that “saw” government orders do not have high salaries for programmers .
Now let's dive into the sea of ​​outsourcing to the countries of the first world. Here, the main combat units are freelancers, web studios, as well as serious large firms leading multi-million projects. What can be said for sure here is the fact that in all these structures the salary does not fall below $ 400. The rest of the requirements differ - for narrow-specialization freelancers, it turns out to get through to a bet of $ 50 / hour or more, but, more often, you can either sit at the rate of $ 10–30 / hour, writing on something trend, or suck your paw for the fact that the narrow specialization did not coincide with the needs of the market. In general, with good English, confident qualifications and some luck, you can get more than 95% of the population of the CIS.
Web studios operate with amounts comparable to our internal "elite" customers, so the value of orders can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars, but as a rule, in such places, wages rarely rise above $ 1,500. Of the significant advantages - it is usually enough for a programmer to do programming, not CEO, layout, sharp layouts and other things that are so important in web development, and at the same time so far from programming. By the way, most of the graduates with their knowledge will go to this place only for the minimum wage in the range of $ 400-800 and most likely will remain on it until they are transferred to another company.
Serious firms can vary greatly in requirements and salaries. Those that are smaller are usually recruited only by seniors, but for z / a $ 1500-4000, those that can even afford to train people who are far from programming on their own courses (however, as a result, the best are still selected). As a rule, in large companies growth is possible from 400 to 800-1000 $, a further increase in salaries usually rests on career growth. So if you have heard about high salaries in a large company, then you need to be either a semi-god, or telling has a thinking feature that does not allow him to distinguish the team leader / manager from the programmer.
In general, the situation in programming is similar to many engineering specialties - in the sense of most European countries and in the United States the salaries of technical specialists are much higher than ours. But still there is one difference - programmers have a little higher salary here than other engineers, due to the fact that the same PHP-person from a provincial town is much easier to start working for a company from another point on the globe than a design engineer. Therefore, in order to avoid 1C across the country, business cards and web stores were created, programmers have to pay. For they have where to run. Such is the selective globalization.
All of this has been told that you roughly represent the difference between salaries for programmers working on the domestic and foreign markets. It is caused by the fact that prices are always tied to demand, but demand is largely determined by customers' solvency. In economics, much is interconnected - its level determines the level of solvency of customers located in it. Everything goes along the chain - low incomes of the population give low incomes to business, then the chain goes from business to business until it reaches the one that wants to get some IT services. The income of the final link, web studios for example, is directly proportional to what is happening in the rest of the chain. We can also say about the administrative, legislative and tax factors that influence the formation of the ultimate solvency of demand, but I can only guess about their real contribution. Even if we take into account the greed of the leadership, in the end we will come to the conclusion that it pays as much as it can pay, and it can pay as much as it earns, and its earnings are tied to the rest of the economy. Generally speaking, how much do programmers working on the domestic market get is the real salary of a programmer (with a small amendment, which is discussed below), which shows how much his knowledge and skills are compared to any other profession in your country.
But when a customer is separated from the general economic chain, then the very same web studio will receive income that is not tied to the economic situation of its region. Laws of common sense suggest that most likely the contractor will want to work with the external customer who is willing to pay more compared to the others. Which leads us to the fact that outsourcing is usually west. And it is from there that the money goes to pay for the work of the developers. In general, the IT market is global, the customer can find a contractor anywhere in the world, and the prices here are global. Those. we have Indians, there are various kinds of dampers, but they determine the lowest possible price, but not the maximum. It so happened that the main price is close to the maximum, there are historical prerequisites, such as the fact that the industry was originally born in those regions where the economy was developed accordingly. Well and, nevertheless, the result to a large extent depends on the price where the economy works, which is again observed in the west. Perhaps the true reasons are different, but this is not the point now. The other thing is important - two people from different countries with the same qualifications will receive different pay for the same job due to the economic situation in these countries. If the payment comes from another country or from the global market, then it does not reflect anything except how much this country or market is willing to pay. Earlier, I negotiated our "elite" customers, in the conditions of the CIS, these are usually companies whose revenues do not fit into the overall economic picture - either those working for the external market (selling resources), either state-owned companies, or companies using administrative resources ... Simply put - their solvency is not fully tied to the solvency of the region.
The salary in this case turns out to be formal, as it is determined by the solvency of the companies of the customers with whom the programmer’s company works - the spread can be enormous, even though the market is global, it represents firms of different levels. It cannot reflect the level of qualification, since comparison with programmers of the domestic market is meaningless - they cannot be paid more, comparison with other similar firms is also meaningless - different customers with different amounts of money. It turns out an interesting situation when the salary is determined not by the qualifications but by the correctness of the place of entry of the programmer. Even if we weed out the domestic market, we’ll get into a comical situation when the salary is determined by the customers caught by the chosen company. The salary qualification here is influenced in a bizarre way - this is the entrance barrier that weed out weak programmers, and of course there is a hard gradation between junior and senior salaries. But in these two categories, wages are determined by how rich the firm’s customer is and, in part, by its personnel policy. Of course, at the macro level everything is logical, the laws of supply and demand work, but at the micro level, the level of a specific programmer, the pattern of his salary size resembles a random distribution.
Is it good or bad? Personally, I like to receive a salary five times higher than the average in the city. Is it fair? No, this is not fair, it is a kind of cheating - there is a game on the difference in the standard of living of the CIS and first world countries. What to do? Stop thinking that if you are a programmer, then you have achieved everything yourself and your salary is due to your personal qualities (no, of course, to some extent it is due to). And do not forget that a free labor market exists only in your profession and in a couple of large cities.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/152035/
All Articles